Foregrounding livelihood and mobility in the struggle for pro-poor urban housing: a reply to ‘Housing temporalities: state narratives and precarity in the Global South’ by Ruchika Lall (original) (raw)

Housing temporalities: state narratives and precarity in the Global South

Global Discourse, 2022

In the Global South, urban space is appropriated through diverse informal housing arrangements, with characteristic inherent and relational temporalities. While these forms of housing often consolidate through incremental growth, change in materials and perceived security, they also exist precariously through changing circumstances. While some urban scholars have discussed the characteristic in-betweenness of informality, others have noted the conceptual tension that policy holds in addressing this temporality. This article builds on these discussions to argue that the temporality within and across diverse informal housing arrangements matters not due to the ways in which it manifests, but due to what happens within it as a space of transformation, that is, of socio-economic and political mobility. It draws from literature across disciplines on mobilities, poverty and capabilities to posit that a conceptual frame of choice and agency is key to policy engagement with housing temporal...

Colonising the slum : changing trajectories of state-market violence in Mumbai

2017

This paper views the impact of these shifts and the violence/s embedded therein along the state–market axis. Intense, everyday violence enhances insecurity among residents, women and young girls, in particular, in highly complex ways. However, far from being passive victims of this violence/s they are engaged in highly creative struggles to confront the multi-institutional injustices experienced by them. This paper chronicles the story of the slum in relation to the city of Mumbai. The story of slums represents the ups and downs in an ongoing struggle of the poor to assert their right to the city. It is a struggle characterised by violence in many forms: as development strategy by the state, as claim-making strategy by the poor and as both outcome and means of household coping, and all of these set in a context of larger structural violence that enhances the inequality among regions, the rural and the urban and among people. There are both significant continuities and critical shift...

Melancholia of the Past: Remembering communal violence in a Mumbai slum

South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 2022

This article analyses how the demolition of the Babri Masjid by Hindu nationalists and the communal violence in its aftermath (1992-93) is remembered in a predominantly Muslim slum neighbourhood in Mumbai. By drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, it considers how a traumatic event is given meaning through fragmented memories inscribed in the urban space. A nuanced analysis of the recollections of the city's Muslim poor, who faced the main brunt of the violence, suggests that the spatial context of the Muslim neighbourhoods provide a safe social backdrop for the expression of an otherwise suppressed memory that has been pushed by the official narratives of the past into marginality, leading to the creation of an alternative sociality that addresses community concerns to break the hold of the past and imagine a future of peaceful cohabitation.

Spatial Violence and Representation Dharavi, A Virtually Violated Neighborhood (A part)

This paper explores spatial violence as a working idea, which is developed through the lens of representations in popular media. Space here is approached not as a physical place but rather as an area constructed in media independent of territorial boundaries. It is in this context that violence is investigated, as a mechanism that relies on the production of representations in an attempt to replace the image of a physical space with damaging stereotypes. This paper studies the emergence of such stereotypes in a specific case study, the Dharavi settlement in Mumbai, and aims at establishing a connection between popular stereotypes of Dharavi and the settlement's spatial future in the city.

The Dialectics of Urban Form and Violence

Over a 50-year span, Institute of Development Studies (IDS) research has not focused on cities or urbanisation to the extent it might have. We find that there is good reason for cities to now be described as the ‘new frontier’ for international development. In particular, violence is increasingly a defining characteristic of urban living in both conflict and non-conflict settings. This has important consequences for the relatively under-researched links between urban violence, the processes of state building, and wider development goals. Benefiting from key IDS contributions to the debates on the security–development nexus, citizenship and the hybrid nature of the governance landscape, we argue that the moment is opportune for the Institute to deepen its research and policy expertise on urban violence ‘in the vernacular’.

‘When the house burns down’: displacement, precariousness and inhabitation

2024

Displacement and precarity are two conditions that define our broken world. Acknowledging that any rhetoric of fixity, sustainability, and progress is insufficient and that the only choice is to learn to live with the fragments, the paper reflects on displacement beyond its common form of non-livability and the absence of a future. Offering some diffractions across the spatial narratives of three different territories where we worked – Iquitos in Peru, Bar Elias-Tell Serhoun in Lebanon, and Hlaingtharyar in Yangon – and mobilising the critical work of Berlant, Tsing and Agamben, this paper reframes displacement as the unfinished possibility of inhabiting, a tenacious struggle to resist the violent subtraction of future, space and possibilities, therefore contributing to the wider reflection on the challenge of inhabiting the uninhabitable urban conditions of the present.

A Place in the City: Narratives of ‘emplacement’ in a Delhi Resettlement Neighbourhood

Ethnography, 2012

In this article I examine the impassioned yet ambivalent accounts of 'resettlement' recalled by the residents of a neighbourhood settled as part of wider slum clearance drive during the state of Emergency, a period of autocratic rule declared in India between 1975-77. In the context of a sometimes overbearing and at times violent postcolonial state, this article seeks to understand what people do with these accounts. Considering how narrators 'emplot' themselves in relation to their neighbourhood within these stories, I suggest these accounts can be understood as narratives of 'emplacement'. By engaging with both the content of the stories narrated, but also their social and spatial dimensions, narration can be seen as a social act and a spatial practice, as residents seek to emplot, incorporate and exclude others in difficult social relations. By considering the narration of place as a spatial practice, the more subtle and contradictory process of dwelling in the city are opened up for consideration, how people create spaces to live in and speak from in the maelstrom of city life.

Moving beyond Marcuse: Gentrification, displacement and the violence of un-homing

Progress in Human Geography

Displacement has become one of the most prominent themes in contemporary geographical debates, used to describe processes of dispossession and forced eviction at a diverse range of scales. Given its frequent deployment in studies describing the consequences of gentrification, this paper seeks to better define and conceptualise displacement as a process of un-homing, noting that while gentrification can prompt processes of eviction, expulsion and exclusion operating at different scales and speeds, it always ruptures the connection between people and place. On this basis – and recognising displacement as a form of violence – this paper concludes that the diverse scales and temporalities of displacement need to be better elucidated so that their negative emotional, psychosocial and material impacts can be more fully documented, and resisted.